


Sojourn

by thedevilchicken



Category: Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon, Sexual Content, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-07
Updated: 2016-02-07
Packaged: 2018-05-18 22:32:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5945746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cage takes a day off. He gets more than he bargained for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sojourn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thesleepingsatellite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesleepingsatellite/gifts).



It turned out she remembered, but that didn’t make it easier. 

The mimics came again because of course they came again; they’d been damned fools to think the force that had landed on Earth the first time was anything more than just the first wave. So there he was, eighteen months after the day before the day that had never happened, the day only he remembered, eating his morning croissant in a little Parisian café. The waiter turned up the news on the TV in the corner. Cage put down his croissant and he listened. 

He didn’t need to speak French to understand what they were saying: the mimics had just taken London, swiftly and decisively. They were back and the UDF HQ was gone. The base at Heathrow was gone. Thousands were dead and there'd been nothing they could do to stop it. Perhaps this time it was really the end of the world.

The metro to the UDF’s Parisian outpost was packed full of people all rammed in there shoulder to shoulder, but that was pretty far from unusual for the hour. Maybe they hadn’t heard or maybe they just didn’t care, maybe deep down they'd been expecting it. People at the office sure as hell _had_ heard; they were grim-faced and near-silent when he arrived there, forty minutes earlier than usual thanks to his discarded breakfast because after the news he'd just lost his appetite. His CO was standing behind his desk, on the phone to who the fuck knew who because the reports said Brigham had gone down with HQ, but it wasn’t the general he cared about. The old man could frankly go to hell and he was pretty sure he’d have sent himself down there with him if he’d thought that might’ve kept Rita among the living. Hell, he’d already died for her once; it couldn't be too hard to do it again. 

Cage paced; the colonel put down the phone; Cage stopped pacing. 

“We’ve lost London,” the colonel said, confirming the news that was already all over all the TV stations as he clenched his fists at his sides. “They’re moving south. I’m sending in everything we’ve got left to stop them.” 

“Including me?”

The colonel nodded. “Including you, Cage,” he said, then frowned. “You _can_ use a suit, can’t you?”

Of course he could. He was the second best in the world in one, maybe the first by then but there was nothing satisfying about the idea. 

They met on another beach, at the foot of white cliffs where mimics were shooting down all the UDF transports. He saw her seeing him, saw her nod and he didn’t have a clue what that meant but there was no time to think between shots, screams, between moments robbing the dead of ammunition while the sky burned with falling ships and the sand whirled with mimics. He thought about running, and once upon a time he wouldn't've thought twice, but even if he’d lived he could never have lived with himself. He almost hated her sometimes for changing him; other times he thought he'd get down on his knees to thank her.

Then there was the alpha and he focused and he shot, he ran, he skidded to his knees in the sand in his suit and he toppled face-first into a bloodied crater hollowed out of the dunes by exploded grenades. Rita slid down the bank beside him, looked at him, her cheeks flushed, her hair a sweaty, tangled mess, hard and angry and fucking magnificent. She was incandescent. She hadn't changed. He'd have been disappointed if she had.

“Cage,” she said, then she looked away and so he looked away too because he couldn’t form the question in the heat of that moment for all his silver-tongued charm, the charm that she’d always seen straight through. When the alpha swirled down into the crater, they shot; they died together in the bright blue burning acid of its blood, screaming till they had no lungs left to scream more. 

They met at Calais, as the troops marched up onto the ships outbound for Dover. He’d searched for her there the way he hadn't known to search the day before and she saw him, met him halfway in the bustle of the port before the assault that was fated to fail. 

“You remember,” he said, because the day the mimics died he hadn't had the nerve to tell her a single thing, not even his own name. “Not just today. You remember everything.” 

“We don’t have much time,” she replied, like that was a reply at all. 

But they had all the time in the world. And that was just as well because the piece of shit device they needed to track down the new omega was still locked in General Brigham’s safe like they’d never used it before, like they'd never even touched it. In his safe in London. In mimic-controlled London, where everyone was dead, or at least soon would be. 

They died on the beach at the foot of the cliffs for the second day in a row. Two days became ten, ten became twenty became sixty. It didn’t matter which one of them died because they found they _both_ reset the day, right back to coffee and croissants in a Paris café. Every morning he reset to that table with his mouth full of pastry. Every morning he left that table and he went straight to work. Every morning he met Rita in Calais to try to figure out a path to London, a way off that beach that didn’t end in bloody death and yet another mouthful of fucking French pastry. After eighty days, ninety, he never wanted to see another fucking croissant as long as he lived. What he wouldn’t’ve given for Cheerios or pancakes or even goddamn kedgeree. Rita wouldn't tell him what she'd had, just looked at him like he'd finally lost his mind and so maybe he had.

And then one day he didn’t go to work. He didn’t go to Calais and so he didn’t go to Dover to die on a beach or kill himself, to kill Rita or get get shot down over Kent as part of their lunatic scheme to make it inland and into London. He went home to his little apartment in the 3e arrondissement and had leftover pizza and several French beers still in his uniform, sitting there in front of some shitty 80s action flick that hadn’t exactly transferred well to Blu-ray. It made a pretty good change, he thought. People had died, but for once he wasn't one of them.

She knocked on his door about three hours later. He knew it was her just from the sound of the knock and so he let her keep on knocking while he just turned up the volume like some kind of petulant ass, and he guessed he was, she was right. She kicked it in, sending the door sailing back into the bookcase he still had no idea why he’d put straight behind it, and knocked three mostly empty beer bottles off it and onto the floor. He frowned at them while she frowned at him. The lock on his front door was broken but she closed it anyway, almost like a proper invited guest and not like she was breaking and entering. Cage doubted she'd had too many opportunities to play houseguest anyway.

She didn’t ask what he was doing there. She didn’t yell. She didn’t grab ahold of his uniform lapels and haul his pitiful ass up off of the couch, though she could’ve done it and he probably would’ve let her without so much as a pretence of a struggle. She took off her beat-up leather jacket instead, tossed it into an armchair full of old motorcycle magazines he’d been using to teach himself French like learning to talk about engines would help him order a steak or buy a metro pass, and she took a seat right next to him on the couch. She put her boots up on the coffee table in spite of the way he frowned when she did it and she stole a slice of his cold pizza. 

“So, what are we watching?” she said, as she swiped the beer bottle from his hand. He laughed as she took a swig. She didn’t pour the beer all over his lap, so he took that as a good sign for things to come. 

They made it through four more crappy 80s action flicks, ordered a fresh pizza that they actually ate hot and then she stayed the night, sleeping half-naked in his bed right there next to him in a borrowed t-shirt while he watched her breathe and felt fucking stalker-creepy for doing it, not that that stopped him. She was gone when he woke in the morning but came back in just past ten; apparently she’d only left to buy real food that wasn’t takeout pizza, a couple of changes of clothes and a tent and two backpacks full of shit that pretty much baffled him, but he guessed he’d understand in the end if he just rolled with it. She was about ten times smarter than he was, after all. He'd always flattered himself that he was pretty much the smartest guy in any given room but he wasn't fooling himself around Rita.

She rolled out a brand new yoga mat in front of the TV and he tried not to watch her bend though he totally failed; she didn’t seem to mind it, though, and after that she made a pretty decent cheese omelet for two that they ate from the pan with plastic forks standing up at his kitchen counter. Then, when they were done, when she'd dumped the pan into the sink and they'd tossed their plastic forks into the trash, she kissed him. She pushed him back against the countertop and she _kissed_ him, all bitter with coffee and gruyère and spring onions, and then left him there gawking while she walked away barefoot to use his shower. He wasn't sure what to make of it. He wasn't sure what to make of _any_ of it, like she'd successfully managed to render him speechless, thoughtless, baffled, amazed. So he washed out the pan she'd used to cook, washed coffee cups like he'd ever had much time for doing dishes, did it because it was a distraction at least. She came back in while he was still there at the sink, wrapped in one of his towels, smelling like his shower gel and his shampoo and his toothpaste, her hair soaked, slicked back and dripping down her neck and over her shoulders, dripping lower. He watched her walk across the room. He watched her walk right up to him.

The look on her face was like some kind of a challenge and so he took it as one and he kissed her then just like she'd kissed him, suddenly, one hand in her wet hair. She bit his lip and he laughed out loud and for a second he could’ve sworn she almost smiled at him, or at least she got part way to it. She dropped the towel instead and yanked him back in, kissed him hard with her fingers twisted into his old Marine Corps t-shirt, the one he’d used to impress girls sometimes, but goddamn if Rita Vrataski wasn’t just any girl. She was _the_ girl. She was the Full Metal Bitch, the fucking Angel of Verdun. She was the girl he'd failed to save a hundred times, and succeeded only once.

He had no idea where to put his hands - she was totally naked and in the back of his mind he had to wonder if she’d knock him out cold if he touched her. Then she pulled back with a look on her face that said she knew exactly what he was thinking and she took his hands, raised her brows and pushed his palms right to her breasts with a firm squeeze. 

“For the love of Christ, would you stop pussyfooting around?” she said, exasperated. 

He paused for a second and then he smiled, all teeth like a fucking wolf. Permission was a fine thing. He hadn’t realised just what a relief - what a _turn-on_ \- that permission would be. 

He had one hand back in her wet hair in an instant, his mouth at the crook of her neck, the base of her throat, her collarbones, her sternum, while she hooked her fingers into the belt loops at the waist of his jeans. His other hand moved down as he walked her back, pressed her up against the counter; his palm skimmed one breast, his thumb brushed one nipple, his fingers trailed down her belly, over one hip, down to the hair between her thighs the way he'd imagined doing a hundred times or more. She pulled him into a kiss as she hooked one leg around the back of his calves and his fingers teased down lower, between her lips, found her hot and wet and pushed inside her, made her gasp as she was popping open the button at the waist of his jeans, pulling down his fly with her fingertips. She shoved his jeans down and he let her, she took his boxers with them and Jesus he was hard and his heart was hammering and he could’ve come right then and there when she wrapped her hand around him, like he was fifteen again and not pushing fifty. 

He’d have liked to have believed he could do it, no consequences, no questions asked, but for a second as she stroked him, as her other hand gripped tight at his shoulder, as his fingers were pressed up inside her, he almost stopped. Before, the first time around, she wouldn’t’ve remembered. She’d remember this. She’d remember and the idea of her remembering was pretty damn crushing somehow, a weight like a fucking supply truck running him down and he should know because it’d happened to him. Twice. Maybe that was why he'd walked away that day, laughed and turned away and told her nothing. And maybe he would’ve stopped right then, permission be damned, except she pushed him back and she pushed him down by his shoulders right there on the damn kitchen floor till he was kneeling and she stood there, ran her fingers through his hair as he ran his hands up over her calves, as he pressed his mouth to her hip, her thigh, her sex. He looked up at her from his knees. She raised her brows. Jesus, she was beautiful.

He took her hands and she went down on her knees right there with him; he slipped his palms over her waist to the small of her back and she shuffled in closer, closer, till the tip of his cock pushed up against her belly and made him shiver and made her smirk. He tucked his fingers back up inside her as he sat back on his heels and that wiped the smirk right off of her face, but she wrapped her hand around his cock again, stroked, firm and slow, and then he wasn't smirking either. She moved, shifted, fucking contorted till she’d somehow settled in his lap, somehow gotten her legs around his waist, somehow sunk right down on his cock and clamped his hands to her ass to keep her there in place. He’d meant to grab his wallet, find a condom, be a gentleman about it, but he guessed that was pretty stupid when a bullet to the head would wipe all of this out like it’d never happened at all. 

All of it except for the memory, that was, because he was damn sure he was never going to forget the way she kissed him, the way her hips shifted against him, the way she held on tight while he pushed up inside her. He groaned against the crook of her neck as he came because he couldn't help it, muscles tight, on the verge of cramp but even if he’d torn both quads in the process he couldn’t imagine having given a damn. She remembered who he was, he thought, remembered every minute of every day that hadn't really happened, and she'd still done this, still wanted to do it. Then she pulled back, dragged herself up, stood. 

“I need another shower,” she said, patted his cheek and walked away as he rubbed his face with both hands. 

“So, are you coming?” she called from the bathroom door. He wasn’t totally sure if his legs would hold him but he didn’t need asking twice. 

When the mimics hit the French coast four days later and took Calais, they left Paris together. He had a shitty three-door Renault that he’d bought something like fifth-hand that was parked in the street outside his apartment and they loaded up the back seat with crap, fuelled up, filled the trunk with jerrycans full of gas that they picked up all over town at every gas station they could find and then they left the city, Rita behind the wheel of the car and him on his motorcycle, just in case one lasted longer than the other. They went south, stuck to the minor roads, crossed into Switzerland and then into the north of Italy and kept on going south day by day because it seemed maybe the fucking mimics actually liked the cold somehow. Maybe that was why they’d come in the winter both times, or so the speculation on the TV had been before the TVs all stopped working, but he guessed armchair scientists weren’t the most reliable sources in an alien invasion. 

“You’d think they could’ve just taken fucking Greenland and left the rest of us alone,” Cage muttered as he refilled the tank of the shitty Renault from one of the cans, somewhere on the edge of Lake Como. Rita was under the hood checking oil levels or some such bullshit he’d had no interest in doing in any of the months he’d had the ages-old car, though he had to admit it’d been a whole hell of a lot more useful than the bike had been up in the Alps in winter, like that had ever been a great idea at all. 

Rita looked up at him and she shook her head and he shrugged at her. She didn’t have to tell him that was dumb as well as being wishful thinking of the highest order. The mimics weren’t leaving any of them alone. They hadn't come for fucking Greenland, they'd come for the whole damn planet.

They slept in the car until they were finally out of gas and then the damn mimics were everywhere anyway, _everywhere_ , crawling all over the villages by then as well as the towns and the cities. Then they walked, over fields, down winding country roads, Rita checking the map and Cage checking the compass like it even mattered where they were headed, like orienteering past the end of the world, and they pitched the two-man tent overlooking the Adriatic night after night for three weeks. They slept fully clothed, their breath on the air as the sky went dim and they didn’t light fires or turn on lights because who knew who or what would see them. When Rita slipped her hands under his sweater in the dark after sunset, they were freezing. They shivered together till they slept, most nights. 

It was less than a month till there were no radio signals left to pick up anywhere they went, till there were no people left in the villages they skirted and barely any mimics, either, till all they could see through the scuffed binoculars they’d brought with them from Paris was bodies and rubble and not much else besides. They drank wine in a deserted vineyard south of Naples, drank from real wine glasses instead of plastic cups that unscrewed from the top of Rita’s Thermos. They skinnydipped in the sea, their clothes on the rocks outside Sorrento, and they shivered as they dried each other down, salt on their skin and in their hair, salt on his lips as he kissed her neck, her wrists. He’d always wanted to see Italy, just not after the end of the world. He’d wanted cities and museums and restaurants and pretty girls, espresso and pizza and soft beds in crazy-expensive hotels. They likely weren’t the only people left in the world right then but as time passed by it sometimes felt like it. 

“We’ll come here again sometime, right?” he asked, as they pitched their shitty tent in a field overlooking the sea. The sun was setting over the water. It was beautiful, but for all that beauty he felt fucking bleak. Sometimes the whole world felt bleak with no people left in it but them. 

Rita finished hammering in the last tent peg, tying down the last guy line, and looked up at him from a crouch by the front of the tent. They’d gotten pretty efficient with it, but they’d had time to, whole months by then, almost as many new days as the days they'd repeated all tacked together on end. He'd counted. Then she put down the hammer and she went back up to her feet and she stepped closer, closer still, brought her cold hands in their fingerless gloves up to his shoulders, patted his cheek with one palm. 

“You’re ready to go?” she said, like that was an answer to his question. She’d always had a knack for answering the question he _hadn’t_ asked. She knew him just as well as he knew her.

He drew his sidearm from the holster he wore strapped there over his thigh, where it always was, just in case. That was an answer, he thought, and a clear one. She smiled. 

“Let’s eat first,” she said. “I hear the seafood around here’s to die for.”

He chuckled and agreed. They’d spent three terrible hours fishing off of a pier in the chilly spring air now winter was doing its best to pass and come up empty-handed - what they had was canned tuna raided from the pantry of a farmhouse outside town that they sat down to eat next to the first and only fire they’d set since Europe had fallen. It didn’t matter anymore who saw them, after all. 

After dark, in the tent, Rita kissed him. After dark, they took off just enough of their clothes so that Rita could fumble him in between her thighs, so she could straddle his hips and get him inside her, hard and tight. He could barely see her in the failing light but he knew every inch of her by then so that was fine, it really was; he knew the hip bones under his hands, the curve of her still-clothed breasts. He knew the hitch in her breath as he rubbed at her clit with the pad of one thumb, harder than he’d ever thought she’d like but just the way she’d shown him, that one night back up north outside Verona. She came with a gasp, one hand tight around his wrist, and brought him off with her, making him groan with it, the sounds he made so much louder every time than she ever was. He didn’t mind when she laughed at him breathlessly for it because she didn’t mind that he pulled her down into a kiss to stop her. 

He was still inside her when his hand went for his gun. She was already holding hers by then, the muzzle of it pushed up underneath his chin, cold and hard and unpleasantly familiar. 

“On three,” she said. It was strange to get a warning after all that time. It was even stranger than that because they both knew they didn’t _both_ have to die for the reset to take. It felt like that meant something, somehow. 

“On three,” he said, touching his finger to the trigger. He didn’t need to close his eyes in the dark, but he did it anyway. 

After seven months of crappy canned goods, he guessed the croissant tasted pretty good. 

He went to work and he went to Calais and there she was with her hair tied back, ignoring the stares because even eighteen months after the end of the war that had been nothing at all like the end of the war, she was still just as famous as ever. She looked at him just like she’d looked at him the first thousand times they’d met for the first time; he smiled tightly, nodded. She returned the nod. 

“I think I’m in love with you,” he’d told her, one night near Florence. They’d stayed outside of cities since the day they’d left Paris. It was the closest they’d been to a city that night in weeks, and only because everyone was dead there, because the mimics maybe hadn't come back yet. They weren't reckless but it wasn't like death was exactly the end.

“What makes you think I don’t know?” she’d replied. 

He’d expected more fanfare, expected her to stare or glare or grimace at least. She’d handed him a cup of the coffee she’d been brewing over the little gas camp stove on the dusty kitchen counter instead and he drank, the coffee still so hot it burned his tongue and when they’d taken off their clothes in a room in a house that had likely been deserted for weeks by then, maybe months, in a bed with sheets they’d changed together so they wouldn’t be lying in the dust of whatever lives had gone there before them, his tongue was still half numb from it as he trailed the tip of it over her belly, between her thighs, between her lips. Her fingers went tight in the sheets that smelled of old farmhouse cupboards but that was just reassuring somehow, like the world hadn't ended after all. She didn’t tell him to stop and so he didn’t. 

He went to her by the dropships at Calais, skirted groups of soldiers till he was by her side because somehow that felt natural, like no one in the world was really real except the two of them because no one else would ever remember those months that hadn't happened for anyone but them. She handed him her sword and he held it while she adjusted her hair and the others watched because the Full Metal Bitch had been a loner since Verdun, but she never seemed to care what anyone thought, even as their fingers brushed when he handed back her weapon. Maybe this time he’d even learn to use it. She remembered teaching him everything else. 

They’d cross the English Channel to Dover and they’d die on the beach or they’d commandeer a ship and get themselves shot down somewhere near Ashford or Maidstone or Southend-on-Sea. Maybe this time they’d swing around north and try coming down from Cambridge and see how far they’d get before the mimics found them. Maybe they’d swing west of Dover instead and come up from Brighton or Portsmouth and Rita wouldn’t talk on the way but she didn’t need to talk. She’d spent every summer in Brighton, growing up, and the mimics would take it if they didn’t stop them. She’d lived in London all her life before the UDF and the mimics had already taken that. She wouldn’t let that be the end. He'd be there with her when she stopped them.

They boarded Rita’s ship together. Maybe they didn’t have a plan but they’d get there, they’d do it, they’d figure it out like they had before. After all, they’d both seen the future, seen past the end of the world; if it took them forever, an eternity of that one day in all its permutations, an eternity of exploring every possibility, they wouldn’t let it happen again. They were the only ones who could stop it. 

They’d save the world together, Cage thought as they engines roared to life. They’d find the omega and they’d end the invasion and then after that, who knew. Maybe they’d have a life together in days they wouldn’t have to take back in the end with a gunshot. He couldn’t even begin to imagine how it would work when they weren’t two steps from death, but he wanted to find out. 

She took his hand as they sped across the water, laced her fingers with his while there was no one else there to see. Maybe she’d’ve done it had the whole damn ship been full of soldiers. She knew as well as he did that they were the only two who’d remember it. 

“Let’s not balls this up,” she said. “Believe it or not, I don’t _enjoy_ shooting you.”

“Well, you do a great job faking it.” 

For a moment, she smiled, but the moment passed. They’d drop soon and they’d live or they’d die together, like they had so many times before. 

He'd never asked her why she'd let him walk away from that cycle, never asked why she'd stayed with him instead of dragging his worthless butt back up to Calais, why she'd never talked about plans, about London, about Carter's device or finding the omega. He thought maybe she knew he'd needed a break from it. As he looked at her then, he realised maybe she'd needed it just as much as he had. They'd both needed it to keep going. They'd both needed it to have the strength to save the world.

When the day was done, maybe they’d have a life together and maybe this time the mimics wouldn’t come back after. But if they did and when they did, the two of them would be waiting. They'd be side by side for as long as it took. He'd never leave her. Somehow he knew she'd never make him.

“Drop,” she said. 

He dropped. 

He told himself there was just one day between them and the rest of their life. In a way, there was.


End file.
